Scholarly Productivity: A Regional Study of Physical Therapy Faculty in Schools of Allied Health

Abstract

A study of the scholarly activities of physical therapy faculty members in selected schools of allied health was conducted through a mailed questionnaire survey. The analysis of the data provided by the respondents (N = 127; 97.6%) revealed the following: 1) the respondents' primary scholarly activity was authorship of referred journal articles; 2) a majority of the respondents presented a paper at a professional meeting during the past three years; 3) only a small percentage of the respondents had directed extramurally funded projects; 4) the majority of the respondents indicated that their own academic preparation was the primary factor that encouraged their scholarly pursuits and that heavy teaching and administrative responsibilities were the primary discouraging factors; and 5) the respondents indicated that faculty scholarly activities are, and will continue to be, important considerations in academic promotion decisions. Comparison of the data provided by these respondents with data from the 1983 American Physical Therapy Association physical therapy faculty survey suggests modest gains in scholarly productivity. The implications of these findings are that faculty development programs are warranted and physical therapy administrators and faculty should join forces in finding more effective ways to involve faculty in research activities.

Research productivity of doctor of physical therapy faculty promoted in the southeastern United States

“…We found that eight subjects (17.8%) had no indexed publications, consistent with findings in 2009 from self-reported data of entry-level DPT faculty [12]. In contrast, a study of SE program faculty performed in 1987 identified 30% of 127 respondent self-reporting physical therapy faculty as not having authored a scholarly work [11] indicating a possible increase in research productivity over the past 30 years. The faculty that represented the median received 53 total citations for scholarly work in indexed publications; a total of 11 subjects (24.4%) had received zero citations.…”

“…The decision to collect research productivity data from promoted and tenured DPT professors in specific regions of the country and calculating individual regional findings is supported by previous reporting in the literature of region-specific scholarly productivity [11], and by the notion that ‘the geographical location of the university, too, could affect the resources, barriers, and productivity (e.g., pilot research studies) a faculty member experiences’ [9]. Such factors may include collaborative potential, the types of regional industries local to the institution, physical distance to other research institutions, and economic factors such as institutional funding and available real property assets at the institution.…”

Professional Master's Athletic Training Programs use Clinical Education to Facilitate Transition to Practice

“…Qualitative methods were an appropriate choice for our study because they can capture the lived experiences of others, 19 are flexible and dynamic, and produce rich description and detail. 20 The socialization paradigm 2,3,6 has been used previously 5,21 to explore the transition to practice and therefore provided the framework for our study by including both students' and faculty members' perspectives.…”

Perfil do pesquisador fisioterapeuta brasileiro

“…When defining the profile of researchers and scientific production, international studies 1,4 have used a combination of bibliographic databases and reports from accredited research lecturers of undergraduate and graduate programs in physical therapy. However, this combination of sources was considered incomplete by researchers who endorsed the latest U.S. study 1 on the subject, which resulted in several letters to the editor 3,5,6 challenging the methodology.…”